A Sad Day: AMD no longer focusing on desktop market.

AMD has been on the ropes for some time now. The release of Phenom II gave them a nice little niche in the budget market, but then the disaster known as Bulldozer happened. The Bulldozer architecture failed in both the desktop and server markets to even beat out AMD’s own older generation chips. As we’ve said on the podcast and in some posts, this was one of the biggest mistakes ever seen in the CPU marketplace.

Now it seems that it has brought AMD to the realization most people had right after Bulldozer. AMD just can’t compete. Today they basically announced the beginning of the end as far as the desktop market for AMD. They are moving their focus away from the desktop marketplace A spokesman for AMD, Mike Silverman had this to say:

“We’re at an inflection point. We will all need to let go of the old ‘AMD versus Intel’ mindset, because it won’t be about that anymore.”

AMD has announced it will begin to focus on competition in the tablet and mobile markets. These are dominated by ARM and NVIDIA at the moment, so it is even hard to say where AMD can break into this.

In the end, this is a sad day for us, the consumers. Intel already had a strangle hold and now that AMD is waving the white flag, we might see prices stay consistently high on Intel products as they are the only real option. No competition also might signal a stagnation in innovation at Intel, but this is much less of a concern given their track record. Here’s to hoping Ivy Bridge doesn’t end up costing an arm and a leg because Intel knows they can charge whatever they want. There is no easy solution if they do though. Expecting a CPU manufacturer to simply pop out of the ground and challenge Intel is asking an awful lot.

Things are bleak now for AMD, but they still have a road map ahead of more CPUs. Admitting you don’t care to compete isn’t the best sign though, especially for gamers. We need performance and often times on a budget, AMD clearly doesn’t even offer that anymore and doesn’t plan to in the future.

This is a huge blow to the desktop market. But even more important this seems like a death nail to the PC gaming market where innovation and bleeding edge tech from manufacturers is king. I can’t see how prices won’t go up, innovation down, or any other way how this can benefit anyone.

Either you guys are all very young or you’re very new to PC gaming. The AMD 64 bit CPUs change the face of computing forever. They took a gamble and it paid off and is probably what kept AMD afloat since then. Intel couldn’t compete in the slightest with that chip technology and was actually BEHIND THE CURVE. Just because we see products now that are vastly superior, doesn’t mean it has always been this way. Even back in the old K-series chips AMD was able to hold their own.

I have very fond memories of my Thunderbird 1.2GHz PC (which, btw, still runs almost a decade later). Prior to clock speeds over 2GHz and multiple cores AMD was able to hang in there. The P4 chips and the Athlon XP series were direct competitors. To act like AMD has always been some sort of garbage, throw-away chip producer is ridiculous.

Intel makes a great product, but as things get smaller and smaller and the focus moves more away from the desktop, I’m not sure that AMD is making the wrong decision. We are likely moving toward a time where the desktop as we know it may be changing, again. A few years from now we might be able to easily mimic this kind of performance on a much smaller scale. The AMD Fusion systems should have been a dead giveaway that this was going to happen.

Nawww sadface :( It’s a shame to see the underdog being pushed out, but they could never really compete. I’d never buy an AMD cpu anyway and with the complete failure that was Bulldozer, it was pretty much the end for them. I just hope intel don’t try to milk the money now. What is required is a new developer of chips, which is very unlikely. It seems likely that intel will have a monopoly over the desktop market until Moore’s Law ends or slows down in about 2013 (unless some new competitor springs out of the blue)

That really bugs me. I built a PC in sep with a 955 and its great CPU but I was hoping to upgrade to a BD by new year. After it failed I was trying to decide whether to get a i5 and a p67 and hope ivy bridge does not loose a lot of performance by running on 1155 or wait for ivy bridge in Q4 2012. Im bothered now because I think Intel Prices will skyrocket on sandy bridge and definitely Ivy bridge.

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